


might be playing it wrong

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Compliant, Fluffy, In love with your best friend, M/M, post winter soldier, pre war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 08:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3760795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The very best thing to realize is that you're in love with your best friend.</p><p>It's also the very worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	might be playing it wrong

**Author's Note:**

  * For [circulation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/circulation/gifts).



> For Alex, who was having a very bad day.

If asked, and no one asks him, because at age seventeen Steven Grant Rogers is the embodiment of a raincloud, miserable and sad and gray, with the occasional flash of impotent lightning, he will say it clearly and calmly: _love is for anyone who isn’t me._

“I don’t think you can say that, bud,” Bucky tells him, because while everyone else has the self-preservation skills that God gave earthworms, Bucky’s that worm that sticks it’s head out in the metaphorical rainstorm of Steve’s life. Like he’s been waiting all his life to say, _ah, yeah, that’s the stuff, keep it coming_. “I mean, Theresa doesn’t step out with anyone, it’s not really about you. Or love.”

Theresa Conlon overhears this because Bucky aims his voice her way, and turns on her heel. “James Barnes,” she says, and Steve thinks that one day she will make an _excellent_ mother, if her ability to scold is anything to go by, “has it ever occured to you that some of us ladies might not find your smile all that handsome?”

Bucky gives that roguish smile, and Steve rolls his eyes. “Don’t bother,” he starts, but it’s too late.

Theresa is doomed, Steve can see it on her face, the way her irritation flickers into confusion, how her eyebrows soar up for a moment, how she can’t stay angry. It’s not her fault. Steve’s pretty sure that if his mam is right and there is a devil, he’d be charmed by James Buchanan Barnes’ crooked front teeth, too.

But she casts her look over at Steve, and Bucky is moving, like a cat, and Theresa is moving too, and this is it, Steve thinks, he might as well call it a night. He figures he didn’t need to go to the picture show, anyway. Clark Gable’ll probably be there next week, too. He thinks if he hurries home, there will probably still be some cake leftover from his mother’s church meeting.

And then Theresa slips by Bucky, and takes Steve by the arm. “How about you take me to see China Seas?” she says, looking down at him almost three whole inches, only one of which are her tiny little heels. 

There’s a very long, very pronounced pause.

It does not stop, because Steve is bewildered, looking at Bucky in astonishment, and Bucky looks like someone just decked him. Theresa Conlon is one of the prettiest girls around, with round dark curls and big wide green eyes, and a tiny little snub nose. She also has curves in all the right places.

The fact is that Steve didn’t think girls like her knew he inhabited the planet earth, let alone saw him well enough to take him by the arm and smile at him like maybe he was the first prize at the fair and she knew the man at the ticket booth. She nudges him a little, and finally he manages, “uh, sure, I mean, yeah, okay,” and Bucky looks from her to him to her again, and his face gets real sour real quick.

“Bud, I thought we were going together-” he starts, and then he closes his mouth so hard Steve can practically hear his teeth clack. “Yeah, you guys, go, I’ll see you later,” he says, and Steve doesn’t know what to do, but it’s too late, Theresa is already pulling him around the corner.

The thing is, when they get around the corner, she lets go of Steve’s arm, and he isn’t sure why, and her smile doesn’t vanish altogether but it dims a little, like the sun going behind a building. When they get to the cinema, it’s practically a cold wind blowing on him with how quiet she is. He stuffs his hands into his pockets and ducks his head and knows it’s bad idea because it makes him seem even smaller than he actually is, but he can’t quite help it. If she were a guy, and he was giving Steve the cold shoulder, Steve would leave.

But he can’t abandon her, so he pays for two tickets and a popcorn for her, besides, and they sit stiffly next to each other and she doesn’t say anything through the entire picture, and when the lights come up Steve looks down at his lap. There’s nothing in it, but somehow it’s more interesting than the people who are passing by them and staring.

Maybe interesting isn’t the right word.

“I can walk you home,” he offers, and peers upward at her, just from the side.

She looks down at him, and the features that were so pretty before, well, they’re still pretty, but maybe they’re not really as nice, now. “Aw, Rogers,” she says, “it’s okay. I mean. Thank you. For the picture. But really, I was just trying to make Bucky jealous,” she admits.

He gives her credit for the admission, for all the good that does. There isn’t much in the way of credit when you feel like someone’s suckerpunched you, but the worst isn’t that she did it, it’s that he was so stupid as to not catch sight of her mean left hook. “Oh,” he manages, and he has to give it to girls, at least when they get you good, you’re still left breathing.

“Um,” she says, a little shy, “Can you tell him I had a good time?”

Steve feels his hands ball up into fists, and he doesn’t know why he’s nodding, except maybe if he does he can get out of there faster, back home to his bed where he can hide under the blankets and pretend this never happened. Mikey Donovan, who’s been beating on Steve at least twice a month from the time they were five, could take some serious lessons from Theresa, because suddenly he understands the deep and unrelenting desire to _run away_.

Still, Steve isn’t a coward, so he sucks in some air, and stands. “I should walk you home anyhow,” he says, “it’s probably dark out, and it’s not really all that safe.”

Her hits may be harder than his, but he figures that if they do find trouble on the three blocks to her apartment, it probably won’t be the kind that cares about metaphorical punches to the gut.

When he gets home, Bucky is there, and he’s the last person that Steve wants to see. “Hey,” he says, scrambling to his feet, as if he doesn’t know where the spare key is or as if Sarah wouldn’t have let him in. “How’d it go?”

Steve really wants to lie, but he’s no good at it, at least not where Bucky is concerned. Bucky looks annoyed, still, like maybe he doesn’t like how this night turned out. At least on that count, he’s not alone. “We watched a movie. I walked her home. She wanted me to tell you she had a good time.”

He doesn’t think that it comes out as angry as he feels, like his own private thunderstorm is raging something terrible, but Bucky has always been good at hearing what Steve says between the breaths he takes to say them. “Oh,” is what he says in reply, and rubs his hand against his forehead. “It’s just a game, Steve,” he tries, then.

“If it’s just a game, it’s no fun,” Steve snaps back, and Bucky doesn’t flinch, Bucky never flinches. “She wanted to make you jealous,” he says, feeling his body tense up with the words, feeling the moment taut against him. He feels like one of those ropes that people stretch across the alleyways to hang out linens and bedding, like he wants to stay strong but there’s too much weight on him, and people keep tightening the line.

Bucky doesn’t say anything. It’s dark and it’s hard to see the expression on his face, hard to read past the disappointment, and that’s worse than the two-punch blow that Theresa had left him with. “I’m going inside,” Steve finally announces, reaching for his key.

“I was jealous,” Bucky says, and there’s a pause, like he was going to say more, but he doesn’t. Steve doesn’t look at him. “Come on. It’s still early. It’s Friday.”

“I’m going inside,” Steve repeats, and he does.

~~~~

After everything, maybe Steve is still kind of a raincloud, only now he feels like he doesn’t have a reason, so he smiles more often, so he tries a little harder. It helps, that Bucky is there too, that the future isn’t so _bleak_ , that it’s kind of like how they imagined it - well, being together, that is, not the weird parts like cell phones and computers and poorly planned baseball team moves to cities with no culture at all. 

It helps that Bucky is there and he’s trying. The first few months, sure, they were pretty awful, but then things started turning around - for starters, Bucky cut his hair, because that was just absurd, how long it had gotten - but then he started wearing clothes that fit him and not just what Steve had around the apartment and he started paying attention to what people wore on the streets, so of course in a few weeks, Bucky was more fashionable and blending in better than Steve ever could, even when he was being dressed by a combination of Natasha and Pepper Potts personal stylist.

As a result, even when he’s not feeling well and he’s thinking, clearly, about things he talks to his therapist about (but never Steve) he just looks.

Well.

Steve doesn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable by thinking about it for too long.

It’s a really cold night, right at the point in February when it feels like winter will never end, and Bucky is wearing the kind of clothes that work with his figure. It’s been 70 years of enslavement and brainwashing, but apparently Hydra couldn’t knock the ability to accentuate his shoulders and his hips from out of Bucky’s head. 

“I don’t think that sushi is really for me,” Bucky says, as they leave the restaurant. It’s almost midnight by the time they start making it back, and Bucky has both hands in the pockets of his coat. 

Steve snorts a laugh. “Not into raw fish?” he asks.

Bucky shrugs. “Why charge so much when it’s not even cooked?” he replies, and Steve gives a kind of accommodating nod, because sure, that makes sense. “Besides, there’s a lot of rules, we should have just gotten cheeseburg-”

He stops talking, then, his mouth closing abruptly. He does this, every once in a while; he’ll be talking to Steve, or Sam, or maybe Natasha, and they’ll be on the street, and suddenly he’ll just stop. Steve always takes those moments to figure out what it is, and when he looks around, he doesn’t see anything strange, just some girls in short skirts looking Bucky over. 

“Can I help you?” Steve asks, because it doesn’t feel right to just ignore them when they’re looking at Bucky like that. Bucky is staring back, and Steve isn’t sure if it’s like he’s been cornered or if he’s trying to figure out something from the past that he used to do in these situations.

One of the girls comes a little closer, and Steve realizes they’re not looking at Bucky, they’re looking at _Steve_ , and Bucky _smiles_. Steve thinks that the greatest crime Hydra committed after torturing Bucky for 70 years was fixing that crooked twist to his front teeth, but his smile, it can still stop traffic, the way his eyes crinkle at the corners, the way he just looks. 

“Are you Captain America?” one of the girls asks, and she’s smiling too, her hair falling over her shoulder in a way that shouldn’t be intimate, but Steve’s still not used to how these girls look, in the modern day, even after spending two years chasing Natasha around. 

“Yes,” Steve replies. 

One of the girls comes a little closer. “Can we get a picture?”

Steve gets asked for this about a hundred times a week, and every time it’s still strange, but when he’s with Bucky he doesn’t like to do it. Most people seem to get it - there’s a lot of talking about respecting the privacy of the Avengers on the internet, is what Maria Hill occasionally tells him, because if Steve has a question about the internet, Maria is the person least likely to make fun of him for it - but then there are people like these girls, who are looking at Steve with a look that’s really familiar.

“Not today, I’m sorry,” Steve says, because it’s dark, it’s late, and Bucky is with him. 

The girls seem to understand, because they put their phones away, but one of them moves towards Steve, and then with a tilt of her head, she looks over at Bucky, smiles, and slips her arm in his.

It’s a strange moment, because she’s leaning in to say something, and he’s laughing, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Steve has seen him be charming more and more often, lately, he’d be scared out of his wits. But Bucky has taken to this, too, remember this part of himself, the part that was so good at flirting that he didn’t seem to think that all love was comprised of was a short, deep stab, right to the middle of the heart. They’re cute together. She’s the kind of girl who, once upon a time, Bucky would have taken dancing, who he would have kissed somewhere in a corner where they couldn’t be caught, who he would have maybe ended up with. She’s making him laugh the way that Steve thought only he could do. She’s good for him.

-being hit with the realization that you’re in love with someone since you were five shouldn’t come when you’re approaching ninety seven, even if seventy of those years are spent like the frozen peas that everyone in this strange, unfathomable time seems to keep in the back of their freezers. And it shouldn’t hit as a blow right against the ribs, the seething fury of jealousy as the person you’re in love with laughs for someone else the way they laugh for you.

But of course, that’s how Steve realizes he’s in love with his best friend, how all the depression and all the searching and all the patience that he thought were just because Bucky would have done the same for him were actually because in the selfish core of Steve’s heart, there is no space for anything that isn’t Bucky Barnes, and until he was back in his world, all that was there was the angry fury of the absence of love.

A storm. A screaming fury of one, the kind that knocks the power out, the kind that leaves wreaks of the world around it, a storm that was screaming for Bucky the whole time.

That’s what it was all along.

Bucky looks up at Steve, then, pleased at first, and his smile falters a bit. “Thanks,” he says, moving her hand away from his arm. “But we have places to be.”

The girl looks at Steve’s face and there’s _triumph_ , there, and Steve isn’t sure why until they’re back at the house. “She wanted you to know she had a good time,” Bucky says, and the memory comes back in that odd frame that all of Steve’s memories before the serum have, the ones where all the colors were wrong, and his brain just can’t be bothered to right them.

“If love is a game,” Steve says, “I’m not good at winning.”

Bucky looks at him like maybe he hears what Steve is saying, like he understands the words between the words and the way that the sounds Steve’s breath makes aren’t the ones he means. “She wanted to make you jealous,” Bucky says.

“That’s my line,” Steve replies, but Bucky shakes his head. “Don’t be dumb,” Steve insists.

“She wanted to make you jealous,” Bucky argues, as if that’s the only thing that matters.

Steve goes quiet for a minute. “I was jealous,” he says, but where Bucky left off, where Bucky left silence, where Bucky couldn’t have felt what he feels now, Steve can’t, he can’t, he could never. “But it wasn’t of you.”

Bucky’s smile is bright, shining, like the sun. “You got it,” he says, and his hands reach for Steve’s, metal and flesh, and he holds his arms.

“I got it,” Steve assures him, and kisses him on the top of the head, and that’s all it takes for him to be out of the game.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and some of the dialogue comes from Noah and the Whale's song "Two Atoms in a Molecule" which is a great song but not a very Steve and Bucky song in my opinion but it doesn't matter because it wrenched me from my writer's block.


End file.
